The constant onslaught of Progressive Web Apps over the past few years has fundamentally altered the way people interact with websites and apps. The euphoric “there’s an app for that” frenzy of the 2010s has given way to app fatigue, making the Lightweight, heavy and responsive PWAs the preferred alternative to native apps and the potential next frontier for web and mobile apps.
There’s a lot to love about progressive web apps, and they’re “progressive” for starters, meaning anyone can use them regardless of browser, operating system, or app download requirements. Instead of downloading new apps every time users want to try a new product or service, accessing a PWA is similar to visiting a website, you just enter the address and the site works just like any native mobile app.
That said, however, PWAs have increasingly become a buzzword, and while many of their revolutionary claims and promises still hold true, their proponents often overlook their many limitations and drawbacks. In this article, we delve into certain shortcomings of PWAs, compared to native apps, to provide a well-rounded picture for users, developers, and other stakeholders.
Lack of discovery
While it remains to be seen how Android and iOS adapt to the growing prevalence of PWAs, for now, however, native apps still hold the upper hand in terms of distribution and discovery. Apple’s App Store for iOS and Google’s Play Store are basically busy marketplaces, where even new apps can earn quite quickly, with little or no marketing spend.
Although both app stores are becoming more and more saturated in recent years, they are still orders of magnitude better compared to web app discovery pitted against trillions of web pages in search engines. It goes without saying that App Store Optimization (ASO), or the process of ranking within app stores, is much simpler and much less expensive compared to Search Engine Optimization (SEO ).
Performance limitations
PWAs, at their core, are just web pages that mimic apps, along with certain app-like features. They can access platform and hardware resources, but only to a certain extent, and because they run in browsers, they face latency and heavy battery usage, compared to native apps. PWA capabilities and supported features continue to expand steadily, and these concerns should be resolved over time.
Native apps can access the full potential of the device’s hardware to deliver faster computations and better experiences for customers, giving them an edge when it comes to performance-intensive apps. There are, however, certain PWA apps such as this BeFunky photo editor have gone all in on this trend and offer an experience similar to that of native apps, directly from a user’s web browser.
Less sure
While PWAs are generally more secure than regular web apps, since they must be SSL compliant, they don’t meet the built-in security measures that are still possible with native apps. Despite the long list of new capabilities available for PWAs, they still lack biometric access or two-factor authentication, which is often considered the pinnacle of security when working with apps.
Native apps are generally considered more trustworthy by users, as they have to undergo an extensive verification process before entering app stores. A PWA, as discussed above, is a web page at best, which may not inspire the same level of trust, however, all of these drawbacks are just opportunities, and we should also see extensive security measures for PWAs in the future.
Final verdict
There is no doubt that PWA is the The next big thing when it comes to web apps, mobile apps and the internet. This is especially true given the massive strides being made towards an Internet-first operating system, along with the increasing range of PWA capabilities supported by major platforms.
It is essential to be aware of their limitations at this point, but be aware that there are already a number of solutions in play for each of them.
